A peaceful feeling sets in several miles before pulling up to the Dunlin, the new Auberge Resorts Collection property on Johns Island, South Carolina. Quiet, winding roads lined with moss-draped live oaks lead the way to the Kiawah River resort located just 20 miles from Charleston—close enough to the city’s world-class dining and shopping but just far enough to feel the natural seclusion.  

At Osteria Olio, the wildly popular eatery inside the new Rivet House boutique hotel in Athens, Georgia, creatively prepared Italian favorites lure locals as well as hotel guests. And while the homemade pastas and entrees such as pollo Napoletana bring the crowds, the dessert menu has its own shining staple: the chocolate hazelnut semifreddo.

Landmark concert venues, museums, and music trails around the South continue to tell the region’s ever-changing sonic story, whether they’re displaying rare artifacts, hosting important musical acts, or encouraging the next generation to take the stage. In fact, for many Southerners, a mind-blowing amount of musical history is just a few dozen miles down the highway.

With a dynamic food scene, a thriving arts community, and its internationally renowned universities and medical center, Durham now has the whiff of an edgy city that still feels like a friendly, small(ish) town. Upshot: You don’t have to be a Duke fan to be bullish on Durham.

If walking along Worth Avenue—Palm Beach’s most famous strip—evokes feelings of being in Europe, that’s by design. Innovative architect Addison Mizner spent the early 1900s designing a picture-perfect downtown that feels plucked from a movie set.

The South’s love affair with Krispy Kreme dughnuts began in 1937, when founder Vernon Rudolph opened the first shop in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Using a secret yeast-raised dough recipe bought from a Louisiana chef, Rudolph first delivered his near-weightless confections to grocery stores around town.

We’re more than a hundred feet under Beckley, West Virginia, when the lights go out. One minute, I’m scanning the roof bolts and support timbers above my head, and then, with a thunk, there’s just . . . nothing. Nothing but the faint drip of water down the rock walls. Gerald Lucas asks me to put my hand out. I can’t see it, or him. It’s only 58 degrees—the temperature underground is constant all year—but I shiver a little. Oblivion is disorienting.

“Checking in?” a voice asks from the call box at Georgia Safari Conservation Park’s Jurassic Park–like gate. We drive down a winding gravel road along high-fenced pasture, and a childlike sense of wonder creeps in. Minutes after setting our bags down in a two-bedroom luxury safari tent, it has all three of us in its grip. A vast savanna unfurls outside the sliding glass door. Is the sky really this blue all the time?

Southwest Alabama is a land dominated by water, from Mobile Bay and the Gulf of Mexico to the Magnolia River and the Mississippi Sound, as well as a host of lakes and lagoons, swamps and sloughs, bogs and bayous. As such, travelers along Alabama’s Coastal Connection, a National Scenic Byway, will be treated to plenty of stunning water views.

I am eating caviar on toast at 10 am. I am sipping champagne. I am doing these things in a private suite before my flight out of Hartsfield-Jackson. This utterly ruinous experience is courtesy of PS ATL, the Atlanta airport’s standalone private terminal.

It’s been more than 25 years since a new theme park opened in Orlando—which, coincidentally, is about how long it’s been since I moved from Central Florida to Atlanta. A roller-coaster lover by birth (growing up, we always had Florida-resident season passes to the parks), now a travel writer by trade, I was more than a little excited to check out Universal Epic Universe before it opens to the public May 22. Now that I’m back, I’ve compiled 5 things you need to know.

As much as I love swimming in the ocean, combing for sand dollars, watching pelicans drift along the coast, and eating ice cream by the lighthouse, I was glad for the rain. It slowed us down enough to explore parts of St. Helena’s history.